


The Words of Discipline

by dorkilysoulless (custodian)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Bondage, Crazy Castiel, Dom/sub, Dominant Meg, F/M, Submissive Castiel, if you think I did not mention the bees you are mistaken, stress positions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-21
Updated: 2014-08-21
Packaged: 2018-02-14 03:35:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2176545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/custodian/pseuds/dorkilysoulless
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She has two faces: one like everyone else’s, and one like the inside of his head.  This is why he likes his nurse the best.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Words of Discipline

**Author's Note:**

> Written as a fill for [Hellatus Prompt Fic Tuesday](http://itfeltpurefic.tumblr.com/hellatus) on my Tumblr blog.

It’s like being frozen, and like being burned alive. There is a brother who never leaves and knows everything that would be better hidden. Time stretches long or vanishes out from under him. And sometimes, just sometimes, there is terror so intense that he tries to fly.

Maybe he does because he comes back to himself confused and shaking in unfamiliar places — forests, skyscrapers, an abandoned kitchen — but his nurse is always there to bring him back to his room. 

She has two faces: one like everyone else’s, and one like the inside of his head. This is why he likes his nurse the best. 

Eventually she writes the letters of discipline on the inside of a set of leather straps. She uses these to bind him to the bed. They make him feel safer than he has in a very long time. She feeds him bitter tablets, one by one, until his eyes refuse to open.

It takes a lot of tablets, but the experience is very peaceful.

She calls him Clarence. He tries to explain that the vibration is wrong: too short, too soft. Even if he can’t quite recall the syllables, he knows his name is percussive, protective, protected. She dismisses him with a playful disarrangement of his hair.

Perhaps they speak different languages.

He stabilizes slowly, one cycle of binding and tablets at a time. Each time she releases him from the bed he feels a loss. She writes the words of discipline on the inside of an odd gray band with a box on it, and fixes it on his ankle. It’s not the same. 

“What do you want, a collar?” she asks.

It is a strange question, but it intrigues him nonetheless. “Do you think it would help?” he asks, hopeful. 

She rolls her eyes. 

One day, she forgets to bind him with the words of discipline. They get as far as the garden before he panics and flies to the top of a mountain so tall that the ice forms on his eyelashes almost immediately where the tears well in his eyes. By the time she brings him back to his room he is shivering uncontrollably, albeit not from the cold. 

She binds him to the bed and plays with his hair until the anguish stops crushing his chest. 

The next day, she teaches him to kneel. He is safe in his anklet, and he does what she asks, and she strokes his face and calls him good. He smiles, wider than he can remember smiling since he arrived here. Kneeling is almost as good as being on the bed.

“I guess you’re my pet angel now, huh?” She says with a laugh as he leans into her touch. 

He isn’t sure whether clarity precedes pleasure, or or if it’s the other way around, but touch is the catalyst. 

When she realizes how much he loves to kneel, she tries new things. She makes him crouch with his arms tied behind his back. She ties his arms to a pipe in the basement so that he’s got to stand on the balls of his feet. She binds him to an inversion table. 

The difficulty makes his broken head go quiet. It sends him and into a place more peaceful even than the place the tablets send him. He feels curiously proud that he can reach this place for her. Afterward, she touches him kindly. She massages his hands and wrists and ankles. She plays with his hair. She rubs his back. 

She is attentive. She is patient. She feels good. He no longer panics without the words of discipline against his skin. She gives them to him sometimes anyway because they make him smile.

“You’re a demon,” he says one Thursday when the noise in his head abates.

“Ya think, Clarence?”

“My name is Castiel.”

“Tom-ay-to, tom-ah-to.”

He tilts his head and wonders if his lack of understanding is another echo of his receding madness. 

“Do you know how to say no to me yet?”

The question confuses him. “Why would I want to say no?” 

She laughs and takes him out into the garden to watch the bees. He likes the bees very much. They are helpful creatures who make good things. Not like angels and demons at all.

He is under the influence of fifty or sixty of Meg’s pills on the night the revelation of the Word shatters his chemical peace. He is not bound by the words of discipline, so he goes to Meg and tries through the languor to explain. He has thought sometimes of Sam and Dean since regaining some clarity, but never needed so desperately to communicate with them. 

He makes very little sense the first six times, but succeeds, he thinks, on the seventh. 

She tucks him in. He languishes in an awful half-stupor. He is not well. He is broken. He is dangerous. He is not ready to protect a prophet. 

“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do,” Meg tells him. 

“You’re lying.”

She shrugs. “I’m a demon. It’s what I do.”

He wants to ask her to put the words of discipline on him again, but the Winchesters arrive before he has an opportunity, and he gets a little lost in goings-on. Everything is too fast, too loud. Castiel desires in his deepest being to protect the prophet, but he doesn’t want to fight again. Not ever.

He remembers, now, the things that he’s done wrong. So much to make up for. It’s an impossible task. He deserves nothing. Or perhaps he is nothing. That sounds…liberating. 

Castiel bleeds — an easy favor — and leaves them to their work. 

He tries being nothing in a rapid succession of places. A high place in the canopy of the Brazilian rain forest. A long-forgotten cave, rich with ancient wall paintings. An alley in Hong Kong. The third floor janitor’s closet of a major broadcast network. A drifting iceberg. An abandoned amusement park.

He realizes, as he walks up the remains of the water slide, that to be untethered is to be abandoned. He panics and picks up the receiver of a broken payphone. He screams into it, shattering its funny fiberglass enclosure. He cries out into the void. He is as frightened of being nothing as he is of being. 

Meg finds him in the bedroom of a cheap hotel. He’s torn a piece of fabric from one of the sheets and scrawled the words of discipline on it with a ballpoint pen. He’s having trouble wrapping it around his wrists.

He is frustrated to tears when she tells him to put it down and get on his knees. 

“You can’t use those forever, Clarence.”

"I have to." He clings to his knees to stop himself covering his face. “I need them.”

“Bullshit.” She tilts his head up with her fingers. “You figure out how to say no to me yet?”

“Yes.” His voice shakes, but there is anger in it, too. “Of course.”

“Good,” Meg says, apparently satisfied. “Get on the bed.”

She ties his wrists with the cloth. The headboard is useless, so she uses another long strip of fabric to fix his bound wrists to the bed frame. 

“This is the last time you get these. Understood?”

Castiel swallows and nods. 

Meg climbs into bed next to him. She puts an arm over his waist and her leg over one of his. “This ain’t gonna last. The air’s getting thick and crackly out there, like a storm. I hear things.”

He turns his face away from hers. Those things she hears are things he has given up.

“Suit yourself.” She rolls onto her back, stretches out alongside him.

Castiel scoots closer. He has to rest his head on his arm instead of her shoulder, but he can hook a leg over one of hers. He nips at the cloth of her t-shirt. She gives him a curious look. 

“You know I’m still a demon, right?”

He doesn’t answer.

Meg sighs and rolls on her side to face him. She presses one hand against his chest and lets the other rest on his hip. “Stupid angel.”

“Yes.”

“Pretty, though.” 

“Hm.”

She swats him. “You’re supposed to call me pretty, now.”

“Oh.” He looks at her. The face she hides beneath her flesh is no longer like the inside of his head. Whether it’s her face or his head that has changed, he cannot be certain. “You are. Pretty.”

She rolls her eyes, but he feels her fingers brush under the hem of his scrubs to touch the bare skin of his side. “Anything you want to do before I cut you loose?”

“I…” Castiel gets the distinct impression that Meg is offering him something, but he’s unsure of what it is. More accurately, perhaps he is being willfully ignorant. Perhaps he can sublimate it into something his nature accepts more easily. He considers the fruits of the vine and smiles. “No.”

She leans over him, lips close to his own as she undoes his bindings. Their breaths mingle, and for a moment he almost tastes Hell.

Almost. Almost. Almost.

Castiel throws himself across the world and tumbles into a field of poppies. He strokes their bloody petals and their fuzzy stems and laughs.


End file.
